ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
No clear association emerges between intergenerational relationships and COVID-19 fatality rates from macro-level analyses.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Children's Birthday Gatherings and SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Grandparents.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Contrasting pre-vaccine COVID-19 waves in Italy through functional data analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Students can encourage their grandparents to vaccinate.Nature aging · 2024Article
- Intergenerational Ties and COVID-19 Contagion: A Study on European Adults Aged 50 Years and Older Using SHARE Data.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2023Article
- COVID-19 precautionary behaviors and vaccine acceptance among older individuals: The role of close kin.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Deaths during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: insights from regional patterns in Germany and Poland.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Close encounters during a pandemic: Social habits and inter-generational links in the first two waves of COVID-19.Economics and human biology · 2022Article
- Are You Willing to Protect the Health of Older People? Intergenerational Contact and Ageism as Predictors of Attitudes toward the COVID-19 Vaccination Passport.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- COVID-19 infection induces higher trust in strangers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Close kin influence COVID-19 precautionary behaviors and vaccine acceptance of older individuals.Research square · 2022Article
- Association amongst social support inside or outside the family and depression symptoms: longitudinal study of urban-rural differences in China.Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation · 2022Article
- COVID-19 Open-Data a global-scale spatially granular meta-dataset for coronavirus disease.Scientific data · 2022Article
- Socio-Cultural Values Are Risk Factors for COVID-19-Related Mortality.Cross-cultural research : official journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research · 2022Article
- Understanding the uneven spread of COVID-19 in the context of the global interconnected economy.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The influence of social and economic ties to the spread of COVID-19 in Europe.Journal of population research (Canberra, A.C.T.) · 2022Article
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of instrumental help by older people across Europe.Frontiers in sociology · 2022Article
- COVID-19 mortality across occupations and secondary risks for elderly individuals in the household: A population register-based study.Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health · 2022Article
- The Type I interferon antiviral gene program is impaired by lockdown and preserved by caregiving.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The presence of care homes and excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from Italy.Health economics · 2021Article
- COVID-19-Lessons Learned and Questions Remaining.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 originated in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019 and rapidly spread in more than 100 countries. Researchers in different fields have been working on finding explanations for the unequal impact of the virus and deaths from the associated coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) across geographical areas. Demographers and other social scientists have hinted at the importance of demographic factors, such as age structure and intergenerational relationships. Our aim is to reflect on the possible link between intergenerational relationships and spread and lethality of COVID-19 in a critical way. We show that with available aggregate data it is not possible to draw robust evidence to support these links. In fact, despite a higher prevalence of intergenerational coresidence and contacts that is broadly positively associated with COVID-19 case fatality rates at the country level, the opposite is generally true at the subnational level. While this inconsistent evidence demonstrates neither the existence nor the absence of a causal link between intergenerational relationships and the severity of COVID-19, we warn against simplistic interpretations of the available data, which suffer from many shortcomings. We conclude by arguing that intergenerational relationships are not only about physical contacts between family members. Theoretically, different forms of intergenerational relationships may have causal effects of opposite sign on the diffusion of COVID-19. Policies should also take into account that intergenerational ties are a source of instrumental and emotional support, which may favor compliance to the lockdown and "phase-2" restrictions and may buffer their negative consequences on mental health.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.